Saturday, February 15, 2014

The Alphabet and the Cello Can Represent Horses but I Can Only Pretend to Be a Dog Slurping Pudding

Bryce played Felix Kubin yesterday. Bryce's show is my favorite three hours of radio each week. Yes, an unintended though fortunate tradition has arisen here: what interests me most from Bryce's show is often played here Saturday. I seek out Friday evening what Bryce played Friday afternoon to hear more, learn more, hope to discover new things via ricochet and tangents. Sometimes I own some of the music, most often not, as was the case with Kubin, who I know of but don't know much. I go to WFMU and in the search box on the left column I type the name of the musician and/or band and then look at the songs in the all the playlists the music appears then find the music if possible. Sometimes, depending of when and how WFMU archived their shows there are convenient pop-ups, but WFMU only began providing the pop-up format a couple of years ago, most of the time I need find the songs on youtube or elsewhere. I did this for Kubin last night. Turns out I don't find Kubin that interesting (I'll take the blame), though in looking at playlists I was reminded of Laurie Spiegel whose Expanding Universe is one of my favorite albums. Spent last night with it, in fact.

More Spiegel later, but here, a hastily shot video from my dining room yesterday morning, a 30 second clip of (extraordinary bad quality) robins, mad with hunger, in a holly bush.

Earthgirl was with me, she can vouch: There must have been five, six dozen. They stripped that holly of berries in ten minutes. The ferals watched from the back porch (judging, I anthropomorphize, eight inches of heavy melting snow made for poor hunting), the insides watched from the dining table.

I am so dope I think if I find something interesting all others, not
just some others (much less no one) will find it interesting too (though a friend did tweet that he liked the Spiegel I tweeted last night).
Fine metaphors abounding, life in general, this blog in particular. The
same dope mechanism works for repeating gags I find funny.

Wiki says a Spiegel piece was used for the "cornucopia scene" in the movie version of The Hunger Games. Forgive me if I don't draw the same gratuitous moral outrage at this as I did at motherfucking Eric Clapton's motherfucking Michelob commercial thirty-five years ago. I'm older, hope I'm smarter about how stupid I am for gratuitous moral outrage, save it for grander stupider things. Plus Clapton sucked long before the Michelob commercial and even longer after.

This blog had a fuckload more readers when I indulged my gratuitous moral outrage on a large daily basis.

The vile mood, lifted. I was asked last night by a dear friend why I've changed (and changed for the better, she claims). I said I haven't changed. She cited examples, gave me a chance to consider before I'd deny and she could call me a liar. I conceded. It's too much work, I said, to think everyone of bad faith even if the faith they have is bad in my bad faith opinion.

This post did not start out to be intentionally relatively link free - it did set out to be a lazyass weekend post - but check the blogrolls, people by and large are (sensibly) hibernating.

The above method for finding the benefits of ricochets and tangents in music works for poetry too! Find a favorite poem and type what you think is a keyword into the search box of Poetry Foundation, for instance, and see what poets you had forgot, hadn't thought about it years, never heard of, pop up, then read them.

*

[A STRAIGHT RAIN IS RARE]

Lyn Hejinian

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions

and I hold that names begin histories

and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending

to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden

and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs

can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness

can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once,

my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet

and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend

to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish

my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow

indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see

the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere

between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me

and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains

and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases

are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all

in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.

3 comments:

I read something once about how one of Clapton's songs -- Layla, I think -- was empirically, objectively, brilliant, a clear sign that humans had begun to master music. I think there was a mathematical proof involved. I hate that song. It doesn't do anything for me, objectively (I can tell cuz my body don't be dancing and happily twitching and such), except annoy me.